American Life in Poetry: Column 155

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
The American poet Elizabeth Bishop often wrote of how places—both familiar and foreign—
looked, how they seemed. Here Marianne Boruch of Indiana begins her poem in this way, too, in a space familiar to us all but made new—made strange—by close observation.


Hospital


It seems so--
I don’t know. It seems
as if the end of the world
has never happened in here.
No smoke, no
dizzy flaring except
those candles you can light
in the chapel for a quarter.
They last maybe an hour
before burning out.
And in this room
where we wait, I see
them pass, the surgical folk--
nurses, doctors, the guy who hangs up
the blood drop--ready for lunch,
their scrubs still starched into wrinkles,
a cheerful green or pale blue,
and the end of a joke, something
about a man who thought he could be--
what? I lose it
in their brief laughter.


American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2006 by Marianne Boruch, whose most recent book of poetry is "Grace, Fallen from," Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Poem reprinted from "TriQuarterly," Issue 126, by permission of Marianne Boruch. Introduction copyright © 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
American Life in Poetry ©2006 The Poetry Foundation
Contact: alp@poetryfoundation.org
This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.

very gently it began to rain

Poet, Hayden Carruth, dead at age 87

Whether turning to the immense world of nature for answers, or just looking out his window (he was Agoraphobic), Hayden Carruth wrote of the sounds, the signs, and the silence that is all around us. He wrote the poem "Prepare," for his second wife, 30 years his junior, when she asked him to write a poem that would prepare her for his death.

Here, he reads from his poem "The Cows at Night," revealing that what scares and overwhelms him at times is the wide open spaces, the scores of cows, of women, of souls?

As he began to understand it more, he wrote of his mental illness. In the Sewanee Review (1999), he describes his state of mind: "Agoraphobia… is the scream lurking in your gorge, so ready to burst that the least noise above a cat's purr makes you tremble: when the marching band from the high school practices in the street outside you sit in the back of the closet, when the March wind lashes the treetops at night you crawl behind the sofa."